The comments are still rolling in, and as I suspected, this little 700-word discussion piece is not only causing a discussion, but I’m probably going to get into a little bit of trouble for it too – not legally, financially, or materially, but ideologically. I used to be afraid of such trouble, but then I started reading Slavoj Žižek, and now I know that whatever trouble I get into, I will never be in as much trouble as him.

Some wish that I had qualified which Chinese evangelicals I was talking about when I attributed the support of Chinese evangelical Trumplicans to ‘capitalism with Asian values.’ The trouble, of course, is that I did:

‘I don’t have the quantitative survey instruments to determine exactly how many Trumplicans there are among Chinese evangelicals in Metro Vancouver, but I’m pretty sure that most of them (an estimated 16% of the 400,000 or so Chinese Canadians counted in Metro Vancouver) can’t vote in the United States.’

‘But what I don’t have in terms of statistics, I do have in social media posts.’

‘I am told by both this woman and a financial planner in Richmond – and others still, for that matter…’

‘Of course, such comments indicate that these Chinese evangelicals come from a particular class of people with wealth to protect (raising questions, of course, about whether there’s room in the religion for Chinese people who don’t have wealth to protect). But for this particular class of ethnic Chinese migrants, stability was why they moved to Canada in the first place. (They wanted to get) away from, say, the possible political upheavals of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, or the strangely personal dialectical politics of the market socialist mainland.’

In other words, the contingent of Chinese evangelicals propagating this pro-Trump material is by and large a wealthy class of persons that fled from Hong Kong or China in order to protect the stability of their capital from specific geopolitical processes. What I am saying is that these networks of ideological propagation are specifically Chinese evangelical because they tend to be run by such persons in association with an evangelical Protestant ideology (but often dissociated from the church, because they’d never want the church to get involved in politics).

Because I researched Cantonese-speaking Protestant engagements with Vancouver’s civil society, I have been part of the public that these ideological informational networks address for quite some time. An interesting turn over the course of my research has been a slow transfer of this material from email lists to social media platforms, especially Facebook. It is surprising how much of this material is sourced from conservative United States sites; I wrote about Trump, but I could have gone much deeper into their opposition to Black Lives Matter and their sharing of material meant to defame Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

When Douglas Todd and I spoke with each other about this phenomenon, it became clear that this was a fascinating turn for a network of people that had historically participated in Vancouver‘s civil society and were generally concerned about Canadian politics. Indeed, I have written and spoken quite a bit before about how I think that all of this participation on the Right is an investment on the part of Cantonese evangelicals into becoming Canadian. But what was striking to Todd and me was that the concern from this population was really about Trump in an election in which they could not participate in any meaningful material way.

Todd suggested that I write a short piece exploring this ideological phenomenon. What you see on his blog is what he got.

I’d like to thank Douglas Todd for this opportunity. I also want to thank my friends in Metro Vancouver for helping me keep my ear to the ground. Last but not least, I want to thank the various Chinese evangelical Trumplicans who have voiced their ideological takes on Facebook; it is because of them that this piece was written.